I am going to do the necessary steps to keep the sparc32 architecture working.
I already have my sparcstation 5 running a gentoo 2006.1, and I am trying to make the 2007.0 work.
The work is in progress, I am waiting for some compilations to finish.

I plan to setup a distcc with cross-compilation as suggested yesterday on IRC to speed up things.

I will give feedback about my progress in this thread.
My patches will be submitted to bugzilla if I produce anything useful.

I don't know if I have the necessary skills to solve all the problems I might encounter, but I will try.
Once I have something workable, I would be interested in other people trying, eventually on other sparc32 machines.

If you have suggestions on the way I should be working, or the steps I should follow, you are welcome.
My goal is to make something that is useful to the community, not only for me.
I am gathering documentation any pointer is welcome, especialy documentation related to the release testing process.

I am now setting up a NFS root in order to get more space to test/build all the required packages... This will also allow me to switch easily between different root while performing tests.

I had some problems with the tftp experimental image provided by weeve:
- mke2fs seems broken (solved using a debian image) Bug report
- dhcp does not work (at least on my machine), I had to manually configure the NIC, that's not a serious problem, but I am just bad at remembering my network config

I have read the gentoo release guidelines, to know more about required steps to have a sparc32 2007.0 release.

Unfortunately the Debian installs I have tried have been very limited (and the installs troublesome, especially as Debian usually installs very easily). *BSD is an option, but I'm a GNU/Linux man. Is it possible for me to use any images that you have, to do an install? My other options are Aurora or Splack.

Unfortunately the boot disk I made relied on the stages/isos present in the "experimental" directory.
I basically just changed the mke2fs tools, dhcp and the kernel to have everything working straight out of the box.
But once started you need the stage tarball to start the install, and it does not exists anymore.

Booting with the debian CD to start a gentoo install from stage3 tarball have exactly the same effect (minus the gentoo logo
during install), but as the stage do not exist, I do not know how you could perform the installation.

Another option you might have is to do a cross-LFS ( http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ ),
but yet none exists for sparc32 (although it should not be complicated to start from another one).

Next to my Ultra2 I have a Dual processor SparcServer !? 20 with a second network card I want to install as a firewall. I tried Aurora, but I get so tired of all the stuff I have to deïnstall. So keep us informed of any experiences!

I would still like to get my SS20 working with GNU/Linux, but sadly, I think this is probably not going to happen. Even Aurora are going to drop support, and Splack seems to have a very small following and things don't seem good. Unless anybody knows any other route, I think due to the sparc (32) kernel stuff not being maintained, the future looks bleak.

If I'm looking at things rightly, if I boot the machine with for instance my Aurora cd I could continue installing gentoo with the 2006.1 tarball? Or am I wrong?

Only the Aurora cd only supports raid and no lvm, which means a max of 7 different partitions root, swap, usr, var, tmp, portage, distfiles and home is already 8. Of cause I could keep a part out of the raid1, on a firewall the last 4 don't realy need that security.
After long searching I found the old Debian 4 cd's but the machine crashes at boottime after installing the esp scsi driver at 47%. One time it went past but then couldn't find the CD? With Aurora it boots OK. Weird! Do you know if they support lvm at install time? If not I stop trying.

If I'm looking at things rightly, if I boot the machine with for instance my Aurora cd I could continue installing gentoo with the 2006.1 tarball? Or am I wrong?

Hika

I'd love to know the answer to this. The Debian issue is well documented. I found the best thing to do was to use a Sarge CD, then upgrade the dist to Etch. I found that if I updated the kernel though, my install broke. If what you say above is true, then I'd just do a basic Sarge install and then install Gentoo.

Thanks! I found a Sarch cd, that boots OK and! supports lvm2. The only trouble is how to get the stage tar-bal on the machine, because it has no ssh or browser. I first am going to try to put it there by cd. If that won't work I guess I first have to make a minimal debian install to make the machine accessible, put it there and start the real install...

I untar the stage and the portage tree, configure the base system and start trying to make a working kernel.
If that all works I have a running machine!
As long as I compile everything 32 bit, I don't see any other problems than the usual. Anyway as far as I understand on most distros it's only the kernel realy running 64 bits. They all talk about still maintaining 32 bit userland.

Keep you informed!

Hika

(can take a few days. I also want to make an install script first. The machine is not really in a comfortable position. )

Actually I don't like naming versions by a name. Because it doesn't give any information at all. I had to look several times to get names and versions for Debian in my memory sorted right. In the process I forgot the spelling.
It's all part of the hiding game Microsoft, Intel etc. play to confuse the consumer. Just follow a numerical scheme with major and minor numbering, so you know where they all stand relative to each other without first having to look it up. Of cause with the numbers they also play games. Wordperfect started numbering at 4 and Word never existed between two and six. At least the year numbering from Gentoo still gives some information, although it would also be interesting to know how many major releases they have seen, which of cause differs per architecture. It tells something about experience.

As said before I'm trying to get Gentoo running on my SS20. I've installed a minimal version of Aurora and started in a chrooted environment on the 2006.1 tarbal. I had a lot of troubles, I mostly solved, but two remain. Maybe somebody with sparc experience knows something. I already posted both problems on the general kernel and programming forums, but nobody seems to realy know.
If not I'm going to try to create a 32 bit system on my Ultra2 starting with the 2008 tarbal.
The whole upgrade took almost two weeks, not counting the things I had to do again! On the Ultra it will be a lot faster.

The first problem is I can not upgrade glibc I get the error:

Code:

ERROR: unpack
Could not find a gcc that supports the __thread directive!
Please update your binutils/gcc and try again.

ERROR: sys-libs/glibc-2.8_p20080602-r1 failed.
Call stack:
ebuild.sh, line 49: Called src_unpack
environment, line 3239: Called eblit-run 'src_unpack'
environment, line 980: Called eblit-glibc-src_unpack
src_unpack.eblit, line 124: Called toolchain-glibc_src_unpack
src_unpack.eblit, line 59: Called check_nptl_support
src_unpack.eblit, line 25: Called die
The specific snippet of code:
die "No __thread support in gcc!"
The die message:
No __thread support in gcc!

Upgrading gcc to 4.1.2 (which I first had to unmask) won't help.
Could it be that this __thread support is not supported on Sparc32 and if so, could I set the upgrade to not use this feature?

The other problem is that I can't get a running kernel. If I try to boot it SILO panics saying: